Close Read: Safe and Free

Safe or free? Or maybe both? Glenn Greenwald notes that the logo for Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, and Debra Burlingame’s new organization, Keep America Safe, makes for a hilarious and, perhaps, inadvertent homage to Keep America Safe and Free, the motto of the A.C.L.U.’s national security campaign. Greenwald:

It’s as though they took the ACLU’s logo and wrote the “Free” out of it, depicting America as nothing more than a single-minded, fear-based Security State.

For Cheney and Kristol, Greenwald adds, it’s “the perfect logo.”

The Keep America Safe site opens with a video explaining why President Obama is not keeping America safe—the narrator seemed very unhappy that the President has been playing golf (apparently, the site is not run by Eisenhower Republicans) and appearing on Letterman. Also:

He talked tough about defending those who defended the nation. And the reality?

This was not, as one might be forgiven for thinking, about defending gay and lesbian service members, whose rejection from the armed forces is a reminder that what makes us less free tends to make us less safe as well. It was about the possibility that C.I.A. agents might be subjected to a criminal investigation just because they may have committed a crime. A box on the home page says that “seven former C.I.A. chiefs” have asked the President to give up on that notion. (“Click here to read their plea now!”) Is the best way to keep America safe letting people who broke the law go free? Keep America Safe sounds, on that point, like a conservative’s caricature of the A.C.L.U.

What else might keep us safe and free? How about a United Federation of Planets, and a starship of our own? If that doesn’t seem practical, then how about just Lieutenant Sulu, and legal recognition for his and his husband’s marriage? We seem to be getting closer. George Takei, who played Sulu, and Brad Altman, his partner of twenty-two years and husband since last fall (Nichelle Nichols was the matron of honor), appeared on “The Newlywed Game,” the first time a same-sex couple has been on the show. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)